“Battle is the ultimate to which the whole life’s labor of an officer should be directed. He may live to the age of retirement without seeing a battle; still, he must always be getting ready for it as if he knew the hour of the day it is to break upon him. And then, whether it come late or early, he must be willing to fight – he must fight.”

--

Brig. Gen. Charles F. Smith, U.S.A.,
to Col. Lew Wallace U.S.V., 1861

La Triviata

In 1816 Ascension Island, an isolated speck in the south Atlantic useful primarily as a outlying base to secure St. Helena, which at the time was housing Napoleon, was commissioned as a “sloop-of-war” in the Royal Navy, under the command of a lieutenant.

During the last weeks of World War I the British Army was expending about 21,000 tons of artillery ammunition a day.

Jimi Hendrix served in the 101st Airborne Division, 1961-1962, and made 26 jumps before breaking his ankle and being discharged for disability.

At war with Argentina, in 1826 Brazil blockaded Buenos Ayres, effectively reducing the city’s seaborne trade by over 80-percent before the war ended in 1828, which set off a legal imbroglio over who owed what to whom that lasted until 1836.

Asked why the Army had invested so much men, equipment, and money in maneuvers in 1941, Chief-of-Staff George C. Marshall replied, “I want the mistakes made down in Louisiana, not in Europe.”

Although by the eve of World War I over 75-pcernt of the officers in the German Army were not nobles, fully 70-percent of the senior posts were filled by noblemen.

During their stay at Newport, R.I., in 1781, the French Army had a printing press, which published Le Gazette Francaise, possibly the first newspaper ever issued by a military force while on an expedition.

The first American naval officer to captain a battleship, and the first to take a one into action, was Capt. Philo N. McGiffen, U.S.N. (Ret.), who commanded the Chinese battleship Chen Yuen, from 1894 until the Battle of the Yalu, September 17, 1894, where he was wounded, thus also becoming the first American naval officer to be wounded while in commanding of a battlewagon.